Murderers In Our Midst

I had sworn off arguing with people about politics on the social media, just to give myself a break. But after a few days my pulse rate had gone logy and I was sleeping through the night. Who knows what I might be missing in those hours previously devoted to lying awake wishing people were smarter? Is it wise? Shit isn't going to worry about itself.

So just to get a life-affirming dose of venomous hatred, I wandered into a thread on the neighborhood vine about outdoor cats.

I'm gingerly about that sort of thing these days. Something I might have thought was a simple offer of information turns out to be a highly obnoxious invasion of other people's private business and a threat to their God-given freedoms. Offense is liable to be taken. Epithets are liable to be flung. I edge up to the subject like I'm putting my neck on a slab.

"Oh hi," I begin. "You know, that's exactly how I used to feel about letting a cat out myself! LOL! But then I did some reading, and I decided I would always keep my kitty indoors. I LOVE KITTIES! I just had no idea what a huge impact they had on our native wildlife. And I had no idea they are an invasive species. I just figured they'd always been around and they always ate birds and everything was in balance. Nope! In fact..."

Typical liberal, always so sure you should decide what's best for other people to do. You want to take my car away next? Fortunately this is still a free country.

But did you know that cats are responsible for decimating populations of birds and...

[Ed. note: Did you know your hair can be singed off by being too close to a cat thread on the internet?]

I like my cat better than your stupid birds. Mind your own business. People like you make me sick.

...Speaking of sick, there's a special problem with cat shit too, because it carries a parasite that can infect a...

You know so much more than the rest of us and we're all SO grateful for your input. BTW, birds poop all over your garden too, you know. Maybe we should all stay indoors?

I just thought that if...hey. Aren't you the same person who was just on this site last week all huffy about people who don't pick up their dog's poop?

Dog poop is disgusting. You have to pick it up. It's the law.

Aww, Petunia. Bless your heart. Maybe we do now. You know how it used to be? I'll tell you how it used to be.

We grew up rolling around on the lawn with the chiggers and the dog poop. Our mothers put the hose on us at the back door and made us strip down before we came in. Dog poop was everywhere. Desiccated white turds and giant smeary piles. People let their dogs out in the morning and they were expected to gang up and terrorize little kids until they were brought back inside for the night. They weren't precious little purse pups either, the kind ladies pluck out of their pocketbook to pop a poop like a Pez. They weren't going to dent you in the ankle socks. They were going to come at you pointy end first and bowl you into next week. They were named King and Duke and Bruno and they'd use your little four-year-old legs for dental floss. You didn't know how fast you could pedal a bicycle until the pack came around the corner and showed you a gear you didn't know you had.

Tater takes down a wooden chicken

Nobody wanted to pick up poop or walk a dog three times a day then either. They wanted their dogs and their kids happy and worn-out, and that's what they got. But things changed. Most of us think they changed for the better. Maybe not the kids.

One of these days people are going to feel differently about the toxoplasmosis land mines in their tomato patches and the songbird massacres and things are going to change again. In the meantime I have a jet spray setting on my hose and a great fondness for urban coyotes.

OK, Boomer, touch a hair on my cat and I'm coming after you.

Go ahead and try it, Junior. I can pedal a bike real fast. You've got allergies and asthma and you can't read a map.

The Loaner Dog

My presidential aspirations were shot years ago because of some photographic evidence that doesn't play well in Iowa. Also, I've said a lot of things that shouldn't be said in polite company, because I'm never in polite company. Now I hear that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is in political trouble because he's allergic to dogs, which is widely considered a fatal character flaw in America. So I'm screwed on that account too. I'm not allergic to dogs, but I don't have one, and, worse, I don't want one.

It's nothing personal. We had a dog, back in the days where you let your dog out to poop in the neighbors' yards and they let theirs out to poop in yours, and maybe you picked it up with a shovel every couple of weeks when it turned hard and white, but you certainly didn't bag it up like mixed nuts and carry it around with you. I'm not saying the new protocol isn't an improvement in many ways, but it took the shine off of dog ownership for us.

Anyway, dogs are lovely. They're almost guaranteed to like you whether you deserve it or not, and like you all the time, even when it's not convenient. We do get to have a really swell dog from time to time as a loaner, when her people cut out for the hinterlands. Dana is a big old orangey dog with the finest smile on two continents, and we like her a whole bunch. Turns out Dana is a poop-on-the-fly sort of gal. She keeps walking and drops a bomb every few feet, as though that's how she's planning to find her way back home.

She isn't at all barky, I'll give her that. She might pop out a whuff if she sees a critter that needs investigating, but she doesn't go on and on. Still, there's a whole drum kit of noise that comes with the dog package, and it takes some getting used to. The cat, not so much. Worst you're going to get out of the cat is a sort of muffled galloping with auxiliary punctuation in the form of, say, a crashing Christmas tree, but that's seasonal. But even with the quiet, polite form of dog such as Miss Dana, there's a lot of clickety clickety clickety of the claws on the floor, and then more clickety clickety clickety, and yet more clickety, followed by someone saying go lie down, followed by the whump of the dog hitting the floor, followed by a prolonged, exquisite sigh of disappointment that there isn't more going on, followed by the shlurp shmack shloop of a sleepy dog getting her lips at ease for the nap.

Ordinarily you get a dog like Dana and you wouldn't expect a lot of ball-licking, though. She never used to have balls, but when she turned five hundred, she started up a ball collection of her own, and she's gone at it with all the fervor of a girl with a Bedazzler. They're all over. Back, belly, legs. When she trots it looks like dingle balls on a sombrero. The bigger ones apparently require regular lingual attention.

So add ball-licking to the list.

It took a few days for the last item in the sound repertoire to register. It was subtle, almost imperceptible at first--the soundtrack of foreboding, a sort of velvety, benign tinnitus. I couldn't place it until the day I caught a little movement out of the corner of my eyes. Something was roiling in the periphery: clouds of blondness tumbled along the baseboards, clumps gathered and holed up in the upholstery and thundered across the carpeted plains. Yes. The liberated undercoat of the dog was rounding up a posse and getting ready to do everything but clean up this town. Dana's a good-natured dog. She'd probably let me vacuum her. If she lets me use the crevice device, that would take care of that other thing.

As it is, though, I think I have enough material to make a swell new dog if I ever get the urge.

The Big D

This here is my 500th blog post, and I can hardly hear the trumpets over the sound of my mind blowing. As many of you know, I spent over thirty years Moving The Nation's Mail, a job that allows for considerable daydreaming, especially if you're not too fussy about whose mail goes in which slot. And from time to time I found myself coming up with a clever way of saying something, and I'd polish it up like a little word-agate. Based on the small shiny collection of clever things I had rolling around in my pocket after thirty years, I concluded I should be a writer. I also made plans to be closer to six feet tall.

A lot of times these things never really get in gear. They stay in neutral and make little putt-putt noises and sometimes there's a little toot of blue smoke but mostly you spend the rest of your life idling in the driveway. People get notions for their bucket lists and knock off one or two of the ones that only involve buying airfare, and the bucket stays pretty full, and after a while there's nothing left to do but kick it. The sorts of things that make me very happy are pretty low-key: take a nice walk, look at the occasional cool bug, tip a really good beer. I'm tickled enough with life as it is that I hadn't even really gotten a start on making a bucket list. But if I had, writing an actual book would have filled up most of it.

I needed a bigger bucket. As soon as I retired I put my nose to the ground like a burrowing mole and rumpled up a whole collection of postal stories. I started and finished a novel. I started and finished a second novel. Now I'm about halfway through a new book, creative non-fiction this time. And most of the reason I was able to actually do what I always thought I should do is that I got in the habit of writing Murrmurrs, and that's why I keep writing it.

Yes, I have a dog poop stamp. You don't?

Which is why the occasion of my 500th blog post reminds me so much of pulling a sausage casing out of a dog's butt. Right about the time it occurred to me that cats make nice pets, I saw a friend bend down next to her straining mutt and grab hold of something netherly and start tugging. Poor dog was all bound up, but there was a little tag hanging out that turned out to be a sausage casing. That accounted for a few inches of the blockage; then other stuff started coming out, including not only what was designed to come out, but bits of string, and plant material, and part of a raincoat, and I don't know what-all. Some of that might have been in there for months. This blog, as you may have guessed, is my canine gastrointestinal tract. And you, my dear readers, are pulling on the sausage casing.

And boy howdy, but there turned out to be a lot of crap in there. It keeps coming out because there are people out there interested in it, and they keep giving it a little tug.

Reason I started this venture was to develop what is called a platform. You can write the best stuff on the planet but nobody will publish you if you don't have a platform. It was understood: if you hoped to be a published writer, you need a blog. No real explanation how that works. And people don't just

flock to your blog because it's so grand. You have to go out there and whack your way through a shrubbery of blogs and leave calling cards. There are billions of them. There are photos of people's dogs and photos of people's dinner. You can spend hours at this. Then you're supposed to tweet. Everyone tweets. It's getting loud out there. After a while you don't have time to look at cool bugs.

And not to cast nasturtiums on anyone's dog or dinner, but after a while you begin to spend less time in the shrubbery. And that trajectory of visitor numbers that had looked so promising begins to level off and then dip and dive. You loyal readers are a lot more intimate group now, but I hope you'll stick around and keep tugging on the sausage casing.  And I'll keep posting here because this place is the cod liver oil to my creativity.

Only twice a week, though. We want "crap" to remain a metaphor.

Plastics!

A TV ad from the mid-1960s is stamped in my memory bank. A woman peeks coyly around the shower curtain and asks her husband for the shampoo. "Here," he says, throwing the bottle at her head, and as it ricochets around the tub, she exclaims: "Hey! It didn't break!" This was the dawning of a new era in plastics and sub-lethal marital violence.

It sticks in my head because it marks the time before which we managed to muddle through life without plastic. It's almost inconceivable now. Plastic, a petroleum product, is ubiquitous and an object lesson in ecology, or the interconnectedness of things. Everything affects everything else. A plastic butterfly barrette snapping open in Omaha leads to a gyre of submerged garbage swirling around in the Pacific. The stuff never goes away, but it does bust up into pieces so small ("nurdles") they are now being ingested by plankton. We don't know just what that will mean for the food chain, but odds are we're not going to like it.

Here in Portland, our mayor, Sam Adams, is looking to ban single-use plastic bags from stores. Some people are incensed. "He's just trying to look green," says one, and that's a valid worry. It sets a nasty precedent. What if the President pulled out of Afghanistan just to look peaceful? What if Sarah Palin corked her cakehole just to look intelligent? Where would we be then?

Other dissenters point out that the plastic bags have handles and are much easier to carry, especially for the disabled and elderly. Perhaps we are being a little too hasty in abandoning our present system before we have developed the technology to make reusable cloth bags with handles.

But the most compelling case of all in favor of plastic bags is their reuse in the field of dog poop removal. My friend Margie not only bags up the voluminous output of two Labrador retrievers every day on her walks but then carries it in her coat pockets. "It keeps my hands warm," she explains, another consequence unforeseen by me. I had to think back. What did we do before we scooped dog poop into plastic bags?

We didn't scoop dog poop into anything. Our dog pooped in the neighbor's yard and their dog pooped in ours. Kids revved up their immune systems by rolling around in quantities of it, and everybody watched their step. It's not feasible in the cell phone age.

So what's it going to be, people? Dog poop, or plastic inhalers for the kids? Cold hands, or a continent-sized wad of garbage in a part of the ocean nobody ever visits anyway? The planet, or Lunchables? Give it another few decades of thought, and be strong. We'll never know if we can live without plankton until we give it a shot.